The Solo Game Development Death Spiral
Forgive me for this, but I'm gonna get a bit personal here, a heart-to-heart. It's a last-ditch effort to keep this project alive, or serve as a warning for future game developers to consider, should they find themselves upon this post.
I spoke about this a bit more in the paid section on most recent update on the Patreon (and have been generally for years to many people), but I think I should sort of elaborate with it a bit further to everyone here too.
As a solo dev for a game, especially one that doesn't really have the funding of larger (or even a lot of smaller) projects, trying to work on this project, it gets so hard to manage everything. I don't know how the others manage to do it.
For TTRPGs atleast, not self imposed, but from my audience and what the algorithms require of me, the bare minimum that i must do to keep this operating is as follows:
- Work on the game and release an update every couple of months.
- Respond to the play-by-post once per day.
- Post on all of the social medias once per day.
Now, normally, this is pretty easy for most, but I spend up to 9am-2am frequently to even fulfill all of these requirements, and I have the added stress and requirements of trying to manage all of this ontop of finding a full-time job to meet the requirements of social housing within 3-6 months.
The consequences get a bit dire and morale drops with my fanbase if I don't do this constantly, to the point where I had someone online stalk my advertisements online and flame them to make it harder for me to advertise to more players solely because I wasn't able to keep up with an amount of posts every time. This sucks, and I understand why they're angry, but it really isn't a capability for me right now, especially in such a critical time.
Asking for help from others in the community to assist in these things hasn't really been an option that provides results because everyone's busy and going through their own stuff, or doesn't want to assist. It's not their fault and entirely justifiable, I'm unable to pay them because I don't really make anything significant from this game, let alone being something as esoteric and different as other projects.
With this whole cycle, finally, after ten years, the game is dying, either slowly, or I can put it out of it's misery now and get rid of it and just do something else. Which really sucks, because we were so close to reaching that point of actually making it really good with proper production processes, layouts, rebalancing, rewording, and getting ready for an official release, separating the over 1,400 page works into different books, etc.
What I'm saying is, it hurts to watch something you've spent your most of your life on crumble essentially into dust because it's different from other games, it has a spot in the market because it did everything that the other games released like Daggerheart and Pathfinder 2e had years before they were even conceptualised. It's not approachable because it's so vast, yet so meticulous, but so freeing and strange that it startles and shakes the foundational knowledge and basis of the TTRPG world. And there's really nothing you can personally do to fix or stop it.
I don't think I'd willingly wish this feeling upon anyone, it hurts to know that there are others out there that also have felt this same pain. I apologise to all those creatives that ever got this far with something only to fail now.
For now, I have 3-6 months at the very latest to do something to keep this alive, so I want to spend them doing as much as I can for this work that got me through so much of this beautifully messed up world.
Thank you for reading, if you managed to read this far. Hopefully this will not be the last post, but if it is, we had a good run.
